A felt tent that was neither big nor small, neither new nor old, the curtain was lifted, and out of it came a young girl with a wooden basin and dressed as an ordinary shepherd.

She was about sixteen or seventeen years old, with bright eyes and bright teeth, green eyebrows, and a pretty face with a little baby fat, which looked a little like an apple. Unlike ordinary prairie women, her skin is very clean, and she has a weak and simple temperament.

It was already evening, and the endless orange sunset hung in the sky, and at the end of the field of vision was the same endless flat field. In the faint twilight, the snow-white sheep returning from a distance are like travelers from the sunset. The bleating cry in the quiet world, there is a kind of urgency to return home.

The girl poured out the water in the basin and looked up at the scene, her eyes were in a trance for a moment.

I don't know when she has gradually become accustomed to this scene, although she has only been in the grassland for a few months. Her gaze finally focused on the goshawk flapping its wings in the twilight.

Suddenly, there was an indescribable faint melancholy lingering in her heart.

It's very inexplicable, but it lingers, and then I frown and go back to my heart. She then felt a little stunned, and stood there as if she had lost something, and she had no strength to enter the account.

At this moment, she just wanted to just stand like this, looking at the shepherds and sheep who returned late, looking at the lonely and lonely goshawk, thinking about nothing, not caring about anything, until the world was old and the world was in flux.

The tents near and far, in the increasingly dense night, gradually lit up with faint dim lights, some light through the door curtain, very thin, revealing a warm feeling.

The thin girl remained motionless, and the tent behind her was gradually flooded with darkness, leaving only a vague silhouette. The light of the fire around her made her smaller and smaller, and she didn't realize it.

She didn't know what was going on in her empty mind, at this moment.

From the most prosperous city in the world, all the way north to the vast grassland, she has felt the desolation and loneliness here these days.

For a moment, she was in the middle of the vast wilderness, looking left and right, and she was also at a loss.

Before that, she almost forgot that in this prosperous and chaotic world, she was actually alone for a long time, and she had to face the desolation of the world alone.

In order to complete the mission as planned, the girl did not have time to indulge in these personal emotions, so she took a small caravan and trekked through the grassland, looking for the possibility of settling down.

As a stranger from afar, it is not easy to establish a foothold in this land, and the caravan can only be used as a temporary cover.

In today's situation, in an even more severe environment in the future, the identity of merchants cannot allow them to gain the unguarded trust of the shepherds, tribes, and royal courts, let alone meet the requirements of the task.

She and her team needed a more solid identity.

It was a windy afternoon, and the sky was dark and cloudy, as if a god was roaring on the clouds, and the weather was very gloomy. After climbing a gently undulating hillside, she saw a scene that made her scalp tingle.

In the valley on the other side of the hillside, a dozen wild wolves surrounded five ragged shepherds, and the few emaciated sheep had scattered into the distance, screaming fiercely.

Two of the five apparently poor shepherds had fallen in pools of blood, their clothes ragged, scratched and flesh rolled up. One of his necks was already covered with blood, and blood was gurgling out.

Among the three people standing was a woman with tears on her face because of fear, holding a wooden stick with a stone tied to one end, protecting two children who were not yet ten years old behind her, and desperately waving the "weapon" in her hand.

In the steppe, the wolf, is one of the shepherds' worst enemies. Wolves are the natural enemies of sporadic shepherds.

The maiden heard the child's panicked cries, and the woman's hysterical but desperate screams, and without a moment's hesitation, she led four men and rode down the hillside, leaving the rest to stand by.

It took a lot of effort to fight, and the girl couldn't show that she was too strong, but fortunately, a dozen wolves were not too many, and after the first wolf was shot with a bow and arrow, they gradually retreated.

The girl asked her companion to try to rescue the two fallen men, and in the end, she only wanted to live the one whose neck was not bitten off, which made her cry a few tears. She felt that if she had come earlier, everything might have been different.

In the desperate situation, the woman herdsman thanked the girl and invited her to his house, saying that he would treat them well.

The maiden did not refuse, and helped the other party gather the fleeing sheep, and asked her companion to bring two wretched shepherds, one dead and one wounded.

The girl's Khitan language is very ordinary - the time to study is too short, but fortunately, among her companions, many people who are proficient in Khitan have long been installed.

Along the way, she pretended to have a mouth disease and couldn't speak, and handed over the communication to her companions, but there was no flaw.

The maiden had his companions fabricate their origins, saying that she was the daughter of the head of a small tribe, and that the tribe had been attacked and defeated by a rival tribe, and they had escaped, and that the four companions were her guards, and that now there was nowhere to go.

This kind of thing is very common in the grassland, and it is also well explained, the maiden and others are good, and they are also equipped with horses, bows and arrows, and sharp blades, and the simple woman has no doubts.

When she arrived at the woman's felt tent, she found that there were no tribes at all, only four or five tents. There are also few herdsmen, and there are only about 20 people in total. Such a small settlement cannot be called a tribe.

They are one of the many bottom herders on the grassland, and settlements like them with three or two felt tents, or even individual herdsmen's felt tents, are actually all over the grassland.

Most of the places where such herders live are barren.

The slightly more fertile pastures are all of the tribes of size, and it is not their turn.

They also don't want to join a large tribe, because the way to do so is often to become a herdsman. This is the practice of the steppe.

The grassland is not as rich as the Central Plains, the various tribes have limited force, and the survival resources they can master are limited.

No tribal leader would waste the limited resources he had in his tribe to help poorer herdsmen. Therefore, when other shepherds come to take refuge, they can only be shepherd slaves.

When the other shepherds learned of the girl's help, they were warmly welcomed, and after the woman had resettled her wounded family, she slaughtered a sheep.

In front of the bonfire that night, the girl couldn't swallow the roast lamb that was charred on the outside and tender on the inside.

In the woman's tattered felt tent, there was an old woman to support. And their family of six - now five, all the wealth, only twenty sheep.

With such a small number of sheep, it is impossible to feed so many people in any case.

What's more, I slaughtered one today, and I'm about to be eaten.

Thus it can be seen that the woman and her family, including the shepherds in the four or five felt tents, ate what they did on a daily basis. They didn't have good bows and arrows, they didn't have scimitar horses, they used sticks tied to stones, and they had a hard time hunting.

What is the taste of grass roots and tree bark, that is an unforgettable memory of a young girl when she was a child.

The woman's two children, drooling greedily in front of the roast sheep, stared at them with longing and remained motionless, but they were forcibly thrown aside by the woman, and they were not allowed to come.

Because the sheep was too thin—her sheep were so thin, that the maiden and her four companions might not have enough to eat.

No, not possibly, but definitely.

The girl couldn't think much about it.

From the next day, she took her four nominal guards and rode out on horseback to hunt.

Go out early and return late, for several days in a row, and the harvest is very rich.

The maiden divided her prey equally among the herdsmen in exchange for being their companions.

When they hunted a tiger and possessed a full tiger skin, she became the richest person in the area, and also reaped the submission of the herdsmen.

So, these four or five felt tent shepherds formed a tribe: Xiaoyebu.

Since then, under the leadership of the girl, Xiaoyebu has begun to collect the scattered shepherds scattered on the grassland, hungry and cold, and hunt non-stop to obtain more and more survival resources.

Most of the shepherds they took in did not become slaves. The girl allows the other party to be equal to them, and the requirement is that she must fight with them and obtain certain results with her own hands.

Most of the sporadic shepherds, after seeing the abundant prey in the leaflets, knew that they would not have to go hungry in the future, and they happily chose to join. A small number of stubborn ones were forcibly conquered by the maiden by force and turned into shepherd slaves.

The members of the team brought by the girl from Senan, under her orders, disguised themselves as scattered shepherds, and successively became members of the small leaf department.

More elites in the team, as well as the follow-up manpower, were screened by her and divided into two parts:

Some of them continued to walk around as merchants, dealing with various tribes and mingling with each other;

The other part of the clever, able to speak the grassland dialect and adapt to the life of the tribe, scattered to farther places, and formed new tribes in the way of building and growing in small leaves.

In this way, in just a few months, one or two dozen similar small tribes have appeared in various places. And according to the girl's plan, there will be more in the future.

In this grassland of thousands of miles, dozens of tribes with only 100 felt tents are like waves in the sea, which cannot attract anyone's attention.

But their roots and identities can withstand inspection, so naturally there is no problem of exposure.

These tribes can interact with other tribes normally, or they can cling to powerful tribes, or they can further infiltrate the core tribes.

As far as it is to spy on other tribes and inquire about all kinds of news, there is really no reason why they are not competent.

And each caravan, in addition to its own errands, is also mainly responsible for the communication between the various tribes, and the girl's orders also depend on them to upload and issue.

Of course, if the girl has an emergency order, she can also use the tribe's shepherd to directly transmit the message, but it is more risky, and she may encounter an accident halfway. After all, the grasslands are far less safe than the Central Plains.

In short, although the time to enter the grassland is short, the girl has already established a firm foothold and has initially established her own intelligence territory here.

Such an achievement, no matter who sees it, must be praised.

Occasionally, the girl will be a little proud.

But she didn't dare to be too complacent. Because she knew what she was doing, and she knew she had to be careful all the time. Once things go wrong and get in the way of Childe's plans, it's a huge disaster.

Because of her diligent reflection, the girl quickly discovered a problem in the small leaf department and remedied it in time.

It is not good for the small leaf to be too rich, and it is easy to attract horse thieves and other tribes to covet it. If the battle breaks out on a large scale, she will have to expose her true strength in order to save Xiaoyebu, which will inevitably attract more people's attention, suspicion, and probe.

Therefore, the current small leaf department looks no different from other tribes of more than 100 tribes, the same poverty and poverty. But the maiden was not too harsh on the tribal shepherds, and they had to be fed at all.

People must be able to eat enough, otherwise they cannot be called people.

The girl has experienced the days of starvation and precariousness, and those memories make a place in her heart that is particularly soft.

She couldn't see the poor people with yellow muscles and rags starving, living so miserable and pitiful, more humble than dust. Then her heart would always ache.

In general, the girl has been trembling on thin ice during these days on the grassland, and she has not dared to really relax for a moment, and the burden on her shoulders has often made her feel blocked and difficult to breathe.

Although she is smart, strong and resolute, and has the ability to take charge of herself, she is only a sixteen or seventeen-year-old girl after all.

Struggling to survive in this foreign land full of dangers, she always felt her own small and lonely whenever she couldn't sleep in the middle of the night.

Tears are a sign of vulnerability, and she has always wanted to be a strong person, so whenever she wants to cry, she will grit her teeth and clutch the bedding hard.

But I can't bear it every time.

When such a moment comes, she will always unconsciously recall those days in Yanping City, and think of those people and things that can make her feel warm.

When you think about it, you will feel happy, when you think about it, you will feel extremely lonely, and when you think about it, there will be tears in your smile.

But whether she fell asleep that night or not, when it was dawn, she would suppress all her emotions. When she appeared in front of people again, she was the all-powerful Xiaoye head again, and she was the Su Yeqing who could take charge alone.

At this moment, facing the lonely twilight in the wilderness, she suddenly felt tired, tired, as if all the strength in her body had been exhausted. She wanted to rest.

At the same time, she also felt aggrieved, miserable, hard, and felt that it was not easy.

For so many years, she rarely had such a time. Lost at a young age and helpless, she has long learned to be tenacious and strong.

Although I suffered a lot when I was a child, I also curled up under a broken grass shed on a snowy night, and I gnawed on the bark and grass roots because of extreme hunger, but fortunately I met those people who were like a family later.

Over the years, she has been taken care of and loved by her second sister as her own sister, and she has actually lived quite happily.

This time back to the grassland, after the bloody wind and rain, she never felt sorry for herself, but for some reason, at this moment she suddenly lost her mind.

Maybe it's because the twilight of the vast grassland is too endless, or maybe it's the soaring goshawk that can't hover, and the tiredness and grievances come to her heart, like a flood that has discharged the floodgates, her heart will be washed away.

There is no one who has not felt vulnerable and helpless, and if there is, then we should be glad that we have not experienced real hardship.

Su Yeqing wanted to find a quiet place where no one was around, and he didn't have to hold the lamp, just hugged his knees and rested silently, and took a breath quietly.

It would be nice if there was a loved one in front of you at this moment. Even if she doesn't drink well, even if she doesn't say anything, she can do three jars in a row.

But this is the grassland, the desert north, and the wild land thousands of miles away from Yanping City.

Her siblings also have their own things to do, so who would come here for no reason?

Getting together is just her luxury.

In a trance, Su Yeqing heard the sound of horses' hooves.

It's urgent.

It's like a firecracker exploding in your ears, like thunder falling on your heart.

Maybe the sound of horses' hooves had been ringing for a while, or maybe it had just broken into her senses.

But it's exceptionally clear, and it's definitely not an illusion.

She looked back.

She saw it.

In front of the dim and dim lights of the nearby felt tent, a majestic horse galloped like lightning, because it was suddenly reined in, the steed man stood up, and his front hooves flicked, making a loud neigh.

The man on the horse, with his helmet and armor on his head, his cloak held high, and his demeanor was outstanding.

Su Yeqing was really like being struck by thunder, and she was stunned.

The accident, the surprise, shook her heartstrings that were particularly fragile tonight.

There are thousands of joys in the world, but few are as good as those in a foreign land.

What's more, it's still the person she has been thinking about for a long time.

For a moment, Su Yeqing thought that this was in a dream.

Then she saw the other party dismount and come to her, smiling warmly and softly, like the beginning of spring and the beginning of spring, and swept away the tiredness, grievances, and misery that had accumulated in her heart for many days and nights.

He said, "Don't come unharmed?"